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Windows 8 graphics drivers? Needed?

So, I'm trying the preview of windows 8 and it seems to have done a pretty good job of installing drivers automatically for everything (at least it all works). Other than the touchpad.

But I'm wondering about graphics card drivers. I'm on a slightly old dell laptop, and as you may know, getting updates on mobile graphics drivers can be very tricky... it's usually down to the manufacturer, and most don't bother for long.

So windows seems to have automatically installed some AMD drivers (WDMI? not sure, other pc) that work fine on the desktop and when I tried out Trine. Are these drivers hobbled in some way? Given the hassle of trying to get updated drivers on an old mobile card, are these better or worse than the old drivers that i'm using on vista?

Would they be as good as drivers from AMD? No. EDIT: But in saying that it's probably not going to have major incompatibility issues, but generally Microsoft's drivers have crap OpenGl support and aren't good for performance, at least that's how I remember it.

Does Dell have an updated driver package for your GPU on Windows 8? I really doubt it. You might try the AMD/ATI website and see if there's an updated Win8 driver for your GPU. If your "slightly old" laptop has switchable graphics then you're totally dependent on Dell for driver support since AMD won't release drivers for such things (unlike NVIDIA). If it's a discrete GPU on its own you might be able to use AMD's Win8 driver for slightly better performance or support, if it supports your GPU.

Last edited by soldant; 12-01-2013 at 12:41 PM.
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